Contributing to FOSS as a Sysadmin

The way I help, as a Sysadmin, is primarily by using foss software in my job and feeding back with bug reports, issues and so on. I've raised several hundred issues on Github this way, and try to do them concisely, accurately and with as much relevant information as I can.

being able to reproduce crashes or bugs then documenting will help a lot.

i just dont have the time to decipher vague tickets from users.

take a look at open issues and see if you can reproduce them.

As a 'last resort' if you don't find any technical tasks in the projects you'd like to contribute to, there's also plenty of other ways to help:

• Provide new translations into foreign languages
• Create detailed bug reports
• Do in-depth tests of new beta versions or nightly builds
• Provide a download mirror for the software or seed it via torrent
• Donate money to the core maintainers
• Improve the documentation
• Create (video) tutorials to improve the start for other users and make the software known to a broader audience
• Register in forums and help other users with their issues

Or simply ask the maintainers how you might contribute in a meaningful way. I'm sure they'll appreciate your offer!

Even without development skills, you can still contribute by helping develop and maintain good documentation for your favourite projects or helping with testing and bug reporting.

While I don't know what exactly you mean by sysadmin, it sounds to me as if you'd be better at setting up (and maintaining) CI/CD than most normal developers and that's something that'd be very valuable to lots of projects out there.

Since you using the software documentation and creating issues you find would be a good start. Also as a sysadmin you might be familiar with integration of applications into other software which could be useful as a guide for other users. Especially scripting automation for your spefic deployment.

Find and report bugs. Write documentation.

You could offer to help them run their infrastructure. For example, the cloud engineering position at Lemmy.world

Just checking in to say thanks for asking that question. Always had that same question as a fellow sysadmin :D

Now since i see all those ideas: hell yes. I will reach out to the maintainers of the next project that I find that could use some support and offer them my support :D

Build something that you want. Find that niche that isn't well served by existing projects and fill the void. Either by making something entirely new or adding a feature to something already out there.